They told us what will be accomplished

& we had hunches: tension, trash bin, blindness.

 

Or they settled in with their primer and aftermath:

this & this & hunks of our ordinary lives.

 

We held signs with artful wounds

& shields & articulated

each chorus of what we should avoid. We said questions

 

no one answered. Not knowing, we made notes

in our beds with our bodies. Scraped & clicked

& our stories of their stories

 

were sarcastic. We cast side-eyed

because little else tore down the riddles.

 

We saw them in a catalog of masks.

We saw them put on their helmets.

We laughed in unsatisfactory ways

 

especially loud in our performance

& some of us burned

with exhaustion. When we woke, some of us hid.

 

We wouldn’t unclench. Wouldn’t pour out

of our glasses our fear

 

but we were brusquely positive they were

killing our meadows.

 

The day it happened there were such winds.

 

Those winds pressed forward. You wouldn’t believe

all the versions that the sky blew that day

and those many that followed.